It snowed in Saudi Arabia

Subtle evolutions and the return of nuance are restoring my faith in the ideas and the speaker. Quotes from Tehelka's recent cover on one arundhati roy. I must confess I had stopped listening to her for a while, but the spirit of needing to understand and interrogate these times that we live in seems to have to have made a welcome return into her words.

"What we’re witnessing is the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in independent India — the secession of the middle and upper classes from the rest of the country. It’s a vertical secession, not a lateral one."

" In a climate like this, when people feel that they are being worn down, exhausted by these interminable ‘democratic’ processes, only to be eventually humiliated, what are they supposed to do? Of course it isn’t as though the only options are binary — violence versus non-violence..... But when people decide to take that step because every other option has ended in despair, should we condemn them? Does anyone believe that if the people of Nandigram had held a dharna and sung songs, the West Bengal government would have backed down? We are living in times when to be ineffective is to support the status quo (which no doubt suits some of us). And being effective comes at a terrible price. I find it hard to condemn people who are prepared to pay that price."

"[The violence in Bengal is] no different from police and State violence anywhere else — including the issue of hypocrisy and doublespeak so perfected by all political parties including the mainstream Left. Are Communist bullets different from capitalist ones? Odd things are happening. It snowed in Saudi Arabia. Owls are out in broad daylight. The Chinese government tabled a bill sanctioning the right to private property. I don’t know if all of this has to do with climate change. The Chinese Communists are turning out to be the biggest capitalists of the 21st century. Why should we expect our own parliamentary Left to be any different?"

"I have no doubt that the Maoists can be agents of terror and coercion too. I have no doubt they have committed unspeakable atrocities. I have no doubt they cannot lay claim to undisputed support from local people — but who can? Still, no guerrilla army can survive without local support. That’s a logistical impossibility. And the support for Maoists is growing, not diminshing. That says something. People have no choice but to align themselves on the side of whoever they think is less worse."

"‘Outsiders’ is a generic accusation used in the early stages of repression by governments who have begun to believe their own publicity and can’t imagine that their own people have risen up against them."


Full Story

Displaced Yearnings - II

Displaced Yearnings - I

Brand: Delhi

I'm back. And returning with a cheat-post. This appeared in Kafila , a new site of which I am a part along with excellent people, and which you should read. Click and check it out. This is the first of many postings on an idea that I'm slowly developing, so forgive the infantile analysis and push me further in the right direction.

For all those who yelled at me for not writing in this intermin, thanks :)

Brand: Delhi

In Catal Huyuk, at the site of present day Turkey, regarded by many as the world’s first true city, communities began to form where some did not produce any of the food that they ate. This seemingly simple fact is actually the beginning of all that we recognize as being “urban.” Cities evolved, to put crudely the words of those in the know of such things, when people got efficient enough at agriculture to produce enough for all to eat, and to do so while staying put at one place. These new developments led to new needs – vessels to store food in, people to build more permanent settlements, tool makers, carpenters, brewers [evidence of making beer is as old as the history of cities] etc. Tied together by need, these people – producers now in every sense of the word rather than just farmers – stayed near each other in dense settlements that became the world’s first cities. Academics point to the evidence of a shift in life and society because archaelogical evidence shows that most telling sign of urban life: the first known jewellery, a sign of complex social systems, and an awareness of status and symbolism, that, one could conjecture, represent an evolving society that has the time to create culture rather than simply survive.

In some ways, the story of cities remains unchanged today. Questions of borders and citizenship have emerged, as have those of belonging. No longer able to simply take on those that could find some purpose, increasingly cities have become sites of contestation. This fight is, literally, for physical space, employment and livelihood, but also for notional citizenship – the right to be urban, to belong not just to cities, but often to a city, and the identity that such belonging lays claim to. When we speak of urban citizenship, we must therefore speak not just of land, but of a space in the city’s imagination of itself. Conversely, when we judge a city by the dignity of its poor, we must also assess if cities are able to imagine the poor as city residents. Physical and notional citizenship are intrinsically interlinked – cities that can imagine poorer [read: marginalized on any axis: gender, race, sexuality, class, caste, religion] residents as part of their city space are more likely to organically grow into cities that make space for these residents. Notions of citizenship and city identities critically impact both the organic and planned growth of cities.

How do we determine the notional citizenship of a city’s residents? How do we assess the impact of this citizenship on the way different city residents live in the city? How do we change notional citizenship, and the ways in which city identities evolve? In Catal Huyuk, ancestors were buried under the floor of the family house. Families, literally, could prove historical ownership of land and, conversely, their right to the land by the remains of those that came before them. Today, claims to belonging are more subtle, and a lot more contested. In Mumbai, the city where everyone comes to make their dreams come true, there are today voices that consistently call on curbs to migration on the basis of language, ethnicity, regional identity, and wealth. In Delhi, decades of demolitions of slum communities mean that, like the city, there is little subtlety in our communication to those that we believe don’t belong.

In London recently, I saw a billboard called “We are Londoners.” The signage is the work of the city’s Mayor [who, just to complete the signage system is the “Mayor of London”]. To many, this would seem gimmicky. A branding exercise – “brand” being a word many I know would usually use disdainfully, much like corporate and capitalist, to which it is linked inextricably. Perhaps it is a branding exercise. But it has an impact. Post 7/7 bombings in London and given the current debates in the city about the veil and Muslim communities, London, like the rest of England, is involved in a bitter battle about the definition of who is and is not “British.” The city is fighting its own battle – and the government is staking a claim. Now, how people will become “one” is another matter, but the point I want to make is that the necessity of fighting the battle for city imagination has been recognized. Beyond infrastructure, beyond roads, beyond housing, we must take home the importance of fighting this battle in our own cities – making citizens believe that others different from us have a right to live in our cities.

In Delhi, this city that I love and hate with equal passion but that is profoundly under my skin, it is a battle that we have not fought. For the first time, city residents, the courts, and the Great Indian Middle Class have become open about their contempt for the poor, and openly convey this contempt through their words, actions, and judgments. In Delhi, demolitions occur not just because of Supreme Court orders, but because many affluent city residents believe that they are justified – that the poor are illegal and dispensible. Their citizenship in the city is negated. Thirty years of life wiped out in a moment by both legal and social censure. As we fight the battles in the court, we must also fight the battles in the streets. We must create a new identity for Delhi to make it a city that believes that poor people have a place in the city we imagine and desire to live in. We have lost this imagination. We judge our cities not by their basic services, but by the number of Subways and McDonalds there are. Not by the number of chai stalls, but by the number of Baristas. Our markers of progress, pride, and community are altering. Our definitions of what is urban, and who city residents are, have reached a crossroad. It is these that we must reclaim.

Part of this fight is language. It is branding, though not in the sense that we know it when it is used to sell products. It is making the middle classes see that slum dwellers as entrepreneurs, firefighters, bankers, insurers, producers, makers of culture, and, more than anything, ingenuous survivors and producers of knowledge. We make logos for Commonwealth Games, the Times of India will coin a slogan for “World City” and the cities they imagine will slowly begin to take shape, as they are. On its front page three days ago, the Times of India claimed that Delhi’s emerging “transformation” was in part inspired by its Challo Dilli campaign. Could we, if we wanted to, brand Delhi differently? Make slogans about the dignity of the poorest? Make signage that shows open doors to new migrants? Let us change our notions of citizenship and challenge others to a debate on what this city is meant to represent. We can fight the Master Plan all we want, but we must also fight the mindsets that created it in the first place. It is only then that the planned and unplanned evolution of the city will be one that is based on equity.

Back on the Road

Proof of escape:



The air feels just a little lighter in my lungs now. amen to travel.

Dilli Kiski Hai?

http://www.tehelka.com/story_main20.asp?filename=Ne100706Whose_Delhi.asp

Whose Delhi Is It Anyway?

The Yamuna Pushta slums are demolished; the IT Park on the same riverbank is regularised retrospectively

Gautam Bhan New Delhi

An uncertain future: MCD bulldozers enforce a Master Plan out of touch with the ground reality
‘People tell you to go back to the village you came from. What village? I was born in this city’

On September 18, 2004, newspapers carried a mandatory Public Notice issued by the DDA, inviting objections and suggestions to a proposal to modify the Delhi Master Plan (2001). The DDA wanted to change the classification of six hectares of land that lay right by the Yamuna — just south of the erstwhile Yamuna Pushta slums — from “riverbed” to “commercial”. The change was needed to accommodate an it Park as part of the collaboration between the Delhi government and the Delhi Metro.

At first sight, the notice appears much like any other of the dozens one skips rapidly past every morning. What makes this notice different, however, is that, at the time of issue, the it park had already been under construction for over a year despite a 2003 Supreme Court order to clear all riverbed encroachments, and to stop all construction on the Yamuna banks. The DDA’s “proposal” was, in effect, simply a de-facto regularisation of what planners argue is an illegal encroachment. Just a few kilometres away, accused of violating the same Master Plan, and under the directive of the very same Supreme Court verdict, another kind of “encroachment” had no public notice in its defence, as tens of thousands of people were forcibly evicted from the slums of Yamuna Pushta — home to some of them for twenty-five years.

The vastly different experiences of the slum dwellers of Yamuna Pushta and the builders of the it park raise unsettling questions. The Master Plan and the DDA are ostensibly working towards a city that is more prepared and able to provide a better quality of life for all its citizens. But are all citizens — rich and poor — truly considered equally entitled to live in this city?

In 1957, under the Delhi Development Act, the DDA was charged with the task of preparing a Master Plan for Delhi and also designated as the sole developer of land to be acquired for urbanisation. Private builders and real estate developers were deliberately left out. In 2003, the DDA commissioned a study by the Association of Management and Development Authorities to assess its track record. The findings in the report are startling. For low-income housing, the DDA was to develop 27,487 hectares of land in the 20-year period of the first master plan. Of this only 15,540 was acquired. Similarly, in 1962, the total existing urban residential land was 4,694 hectares. The plan proposed to add another 14,479 hectares by 1981. But the land actually developed was only 7,316 hectares. Roughly half the projected residential land was not developed.

OVERVIEW In the first Master Plan period, DDA built only 50 percent of planned low income housing units, but built excess high income housing According to the Master Plan, 98 percent hawkers and 75 percent of city residents are unauthorised Only 16 percent of planned commercial space in the city has been built Poor and low income colonies bear the brunt of enforcement against Master Plan violations

Yet the DDA did not fail to meet all its targets. During the same period, the High Income Group (HIG) received more (29 percent) than their share of 20 percent of DDA developed housing, while the Low Income Group and Middle Income Group received 44.44 percent and 17.63 percent — less than their share of 50 percent and 30 percent respectively. In the next plan period, of the 5,007 hectares acquired between 1990 and 1998 to extend Delhi’s urban areas, 93 percent was in Dwarka and Rohini. The fact that the cheapest houses built in these areas cost Rs 20 lakh shows that, even in this phase of Delhi’s urban development, the DDA does not seem to have been concerned with making space for the poor. Meanwhile, the same Supreme Court that is so concerned with unauthorised construction doesn’t seem to view the failure to provide adequate housing on the DDA’s part as a violation of the Master Plan that merits correction.

Are the poor paying for violating a Master Plan that the DDA itself repeatedly violates, and whose provisions have been far from fulfilled? The Tejender Khanna Committee set up earlier this year by the Ministry of Urban Development to examine unauthorised construction and misuse of land found that nearly 75 percent of the city lives in unauthorised colonies, out of which nearly 40 percent lives in a combination of resettlement colonies and unauthorised slums. The report directly links this to DDA’s “failure to build adequate housing units and land area for low-income communities.”

This not an earthquake: Demolitions in Yamuna Pushta left thousands of families homeless
Barring Category A and B colonies, RWAs are comfortable with mixed land use in their areas

Rafiya, in her early twenties and the mother of two children, now lives in Bawana jj Colony, and is a living example of this failure. Her eyes turn fiery when she speaks of her struggle to get a pink slip of paper that would entitle her to a small plot of land on the other side of the city, far away from all she knew. The sole provider for her children, mother and husband, she was born and raised in the colony in Pushta. “People tell you to go back where you came from, to the village. What village? I was born in this city. I can live nowhere else. Doesn’t anyone care that I have no place here?”

Rafiya’s case is the norm rather than the exception. Even when some resettlement has been undertaken, it is woefully inadequate. The size of the plots in resettlement colonies have reduced from 25 square metre in the 2001 Master Plan, to the 18 and 12.5 square metre plots allotted today. In addition, the peripheral location of the resettlement colonies significantly and negatively impact employment opportunities, and distances the poor from the already limited public services they had access to, argues Kalyani Menon-Sen, co-ordinator of Jagori, an ngo working in Bawana.

Most Bawana residents came from Yamuna Pushta, where they were accused of encroaching on public land in violation of the Master Plan. But the land where Rafiya’s house stood is on the same prohibited riverbank that is home to the Metro it park, as well as the new Commonwealth Games Village and the Akshardham temple, none of which were in the original land-use plan for the area but were subsequently ‘regularised’. Why is it then, asks Menon-Sen, that the option of regularising the colonies of Pushta was never considered?

There are issues beyond the limited and literal sense of physical space for housing that the poor are denied. The recent debates on sealing highlight an important added layer to any debate on land use — space is intimately linked to economic and social productivity. The underlying issue here is the right to livelihood, argues Lalit Batra, an activist on housing rights formerly with the Hazards Centre, New Delhi. Activists like Madhu Kishwar, long working with informal sector workers and hawkers, point out that every inch on the city is regulated, and the poor’s right to live and work are given scant attention. Unofficial estimates suggest that there are anywhere between 3-5 lakh hawkers selling goods on the streets in Delhi, yet only about 4,000 have licenses, making nearly 98 percent of them illegal and open to exploitation. These same illegal hawkers pay nearly Rs 500 crore annually in bribes and payments to keep their temporary hawking stations from being destroyed, and, according to estimates by Kishwar, generate nearly Rs 3,000 crore of sales and revenue in Delhi alone.

The on-going sealing debate is about a similar point — are ordinary people, and especially those belonging to the middle and upper classes, being penalised for the failed implementation of the Master Plan? The All India Traders Conference (AITC) cites the DDA’s own reports that show that it has developed only 16 percent of the commercial space it was meant to since 1961. AITC secretary Praveen Khandelwal says, “If they haven’t made space for us, how can they penalise us for making some space for ourselves?”

Who then are the voices behind the Metro it Parks and the sealing drives? The Khanna committee outlines a telling story about representations made to it by various actors during its recent enquiry: “Barring representatives of some rwas from well-to-do colonies, who expressed serious apprehensions about commercialisation in their colonies making them unlivable, the view projected by a large majority of other interlocutors was that they were quite comfortable with their pattern of mixed land use, and they shouldn’t be made victims of an impractical, segregated land-use policy, having little correlation with socio-economic ground realities.”

Beyond Category a and b colonies, the voices of Delhi’s citizens seem to be going unheard even as the government ignores other flagrant violations at its own whim. Urban Planner Gita Dewan Verma has called the Master Plan a “penal code to punish citizens rather than a document of citizens’ entitlements and city solutions.” What we need to recognise is that only certain citizens seem to be bearing the brunt of the drive to make an efficient, beautiful city for the government and the rich, but not for a majority of those who live within it.

Writer’s e-mail: gautam.bhan@gmail.com

Round Trips

... and we're back.

Posts about recent travels and more recent returns to come, but until then, to carry on the trend of writing about the city --

a piece from the my writing sautan, that other place where I write:
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main20.asp?filename=Ne100706Whose_Delhi.asp

and the one that goes with it, making me very happy, because I get to share space with two of my favourite people:
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main20.asp?filename=op100706Lambs_at.asp

happy bapu b'day, all.

What's Happening to this City?

After the protests, the bandhs, the deaths in Delhi last night in the protests over sealing, only one question remains: what's happening to this city? Where is this sealing coming from? How do we understand it?

Its a tough, tough question. For many of us who have been working on slum resettlement and displacement, its also personally difficult to handle. We've been screaming about slum resettlement for years and no one has seemed to care. Least of the traders of the GK 2 trading association, who actively pushed for slums to evicted from the Jahapanah forest near Alaknanda, because "those people bring down the neighborhood". To see these signs, then, in the same place as the slums used to be, I can honestly tell you, makes me enraged. "First Rehabilitate Us, Then Seal Us" says one. The other says "Where are Human Rights?" How many times we yelled those very words when they refused to consider people who lived in slums as human beings with lives and rights?




Then the rage simmers and you realise that perhaps this is an opportunity. An opportunity to make the middle classes see what slum displacement is like. To bring them onto a platform that can change the way we talk about urban planning this city. Actually, to begin the discussion at all. We have lost the battle in slum displacement with the middle and upper classes seeing it un-problematically as a "necessary evil." This is a chance to get them to see what it feels like to be on the other end of the stick and use that experience to not necessarily come to an agreement, but at least, to unite in the call for new disucssions on this holy grail of a masterplan.

Lets get this straight: We need to have a set of urban planning guidelines that we absolutely must enforce, but is the DDA masterplan this set of guidelines? It is made by an absolutely opaque process and, more than anything, it allows certain violations (Akshardham, DDA regularisation, Sainik Farms, the Commonwealth Stadium) against it while it never allows a single slum to live and survive. It has no space for low income communities, or any notion that beautifying the city might have nothing to do with more malls. It does not feel the need to answer any questions about why regulations are what they are, and urban planner after planner keeps saying that it doesnt make coherent or contemporary sense. This isnt a masterplan for my city. Not the city I live in, or want to live in.

Its time we fight this document and stop letting it become a selectively enforced hammer that falls only on the homes of the poor, or a select few. What we need is a way to talk about the city again. As shops get sealed, perhaps our minds can become free.

Peace be Upon Him

So I work in a resettlement slum called Bawana, about 50km from South Delhi. About resettlement, displacement, slums, urbanity, and cities -- posts will come later because I often don't stop when I start. But to bring my day job into this space, here's something I thought I'd share which has had me grinning from ear to ear in an otherwise really horrid week.

Mohammed (not the pbuh kind, just regular old Mhd.) is our chai wallah, who has a little shack outside our office in Bawana. He has a regular chai stall where, as it does in hundreds of rickety wooden thelas across the city, chai simmers and boils and calms and simmers and boils all day, squeezing every drop of flavour from the tea leaves, just as the shop and Mohammed squeeze out their lives from the 18 square feet of land that he and his family have been alloted in Bawana. He's been saving up to build a pucca house for the last three years. It doesnt help that his only son is addicted to Bawana's own variety of home-grown smack and lies passed out most days on the charpai behind the stall.

This morning I got a little note from the Bawana office. Mohammed's started building his house, in part because of the regular chai supply our office orders. He sent his latest bill -- two golden filter papers of a discarded cigarette box, taken out, pressed flat, and every centimetre preciously written on.

3- 06 -06 4 chai - Rs 12
4- 06 -06 2 chai - Rs 6

all adding up to the princely sum of Rs 217 for the month of August.

line after line of his earnings in a neat, shaky scrawl across the filter paper, the other side of which sparkles golden. I couldnt help but smile - a man who built his life inch by inch, tea leaf by tea leaf, sent his last bill on a scrap of paper that I routinely throw away from a cigarette pack. For the first time, today, I noticed how brightly the gold shone.

peace be upon this mohammed too.